I am very worried about the sales job being done to push computerized education. As prophesied in an Atlantic article some decades ago, it does seem the poor will have computers, while the rich will have teachers.

Governments can brutalize people who can’t leave. When people can leave, governments have to figure out how to make people want to stay; or else there will be nobody left to govern. The first to leave are often those who are most competent and valuable.

Gray then goes on to observe that “[i]n general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have.”

When schooling is compulsory, schools are, by definition, prisons. A prison is a place where one is forced to be and within which people are not free to choose their own activities, spaces, or associates. Children cannot walk away from school, and within the school children cannot walk away from mean teachers, oppressive and pointless assignments, or cruel classmates.

It is great to have a mix of independent school options, but is this how we want it–options only for those who can afford to walk away from the public schools?